Category Archives: Anthropo-theology

This is where I both explain and develop the anthropology which underpins a revolutionary new style of theology.

THE TRANSFORMATIVE ICON OF SHEEP

Anthropo-theology,

The church rises up, a sudden eruption of art and meaning on a sun-beaten coastal plain. The place used to be abutting a strategic harbor next to the sea until the shoreline moved away. Now its sudden presence in the middle of nowhere reinforces the feeling of a wonderful alien interruption of standard human affairs. Like a beautiful mother-ship set down to invite travelers to journey to another world.

In literal terms the building should be understood as the Christian re-imagining of the standard imperial urban “basilica,” the roofed public space for the conduct of Roman business and law. Because Christian gatherings were not the private sacral space of the temple, reserved for the god and the priests, but rather a communal assembly and event, these big buildings made an ideal template. As the Christian movement emerged from persecution and hiding it imitated the secular buildings where citizens came together freely for ordinary human affairs. First lesson, therefore: a “basilica” is essentially a secular space, something  ordinary, human, communal, down-to-earth.

Basilica of San Apollinare in Classe

Second thing: some context. This church, along with others in the neighboring Adriatic city of Ravenna, reflect the political and military success of Justinian I, the Byzantine Roman Emperor lately taking power back from barbarian conquerors of Italy. Justinian saw it as his job to ensure the conformity of everyone in his empire to orthodox Christian faith, meaning, essentially, the doctrine of the two natures of Christ, fully divine, fully human. This is a far cry from Christian faith as a persecuted and despised minority religion, which was the case just a little over two centuries prior. But imperial politics are not entirely the point here.

What is the point is the wonder of a vision which saw human existence fully caught up in divine existence. While the emperor and his violence knew themselves supported and endorsed by Christian institutional religion, the core vision of this splendid church by the sea is of a humanity completely transformed by communication of nonviolent divinity. In the glorious crowning image of the apse there is no other-worldly procession of saints and martyrs, nor any hint of the emperor or his court, only a panorama of sheep in a land of peace! Whoever conceived this majestic mosaic figured humanity’s identification with the divine not in terms of a disembodied spiritual other-world but an earth turned entirely to its own deepest possibilities of love, nonviolence and life. The doctrine of the two natures and one person was for this visionary artist a human world set free from harm. The divine conjoined to the human meant the communication of divine nonviolence to every relational being, and therewith the creation of the truly human and divine person.

So, a third thing: the beauty of sheep! What are these animals raised to the roof of an imperial building where before it was likely Winged Victory with horses and a war chariot looking down? These are the defenseless, the meek, the disarmed, the humble, the creatures at the wrong end of humanity’s systems of force and blood-letting. But now somehow they are in a land made just for them, a land of tranquility and plenty, with not a sword in sight! It is alternative human space. It is the public building, the basilica, made for the conduct of human affairs by active means other than violence.

San Apollinare Apse

Image of sheep icon, from San Vitale, Ravenna

As you enter the main building the wide welcoming sweep of a foot-worn marble floor underscores there are no seats or pews where people sit to become passive recipients of doctrine. There is only a standing space of human interaction and proximity. The gleam of the floor naturally invites you in, and then lifts up the head to where the light pours through the windows above. There is a great deal of light. The pillars of flowing marble also lead upward and onward, toward the luminous final vision of the triumphal apse. And there the wonder reveals itself. It is here that this public space declares its most profound and generative meaning. It is not simply a concourse of citizens, but a gathering of the human species, onetime victims of their own chronic violence, now transformed into something dramatically and miraculously new. The glowing color of the apse is green, the kind of green of a field or wood at the turn from spring to summer, fresh, warm, touchable, edible, endless. And the dominant figure or symbol within the intense wash of green is the sheep.

Sheep are everywhere, two sets of twelve, and three in the middle. Below they surround the (first or second century) martyr-bishop Apollinaris in the figure of the Good Shepherd, above they stream from images of the New Jerusalem set in the corners of the vertical wall. The iconography bends the world inside out, with the standard victim of human slaughter become now the symbol of humanity set free from violence, in a space of sensate peace and pleasure. How is this perceptual-spatial miracle possible? It can only be by means of a twisting around of normally imagined space, where the victim is systematically not figured, where human business is conducted as usual. Or, if the victim is figured, it is in the shadow of triumphant violence. Here instead the archetypal object of killing, the sheep, becomes the triumphant master image, radiating its inherent nonretaliation as the orchestrating theme of space itself. It is a miracle of art and figuration, but it is born not from artistic imagination as such but from something that has occurred in the public space of citizens below. Thus, the basilica becomes not a place of the king and his many weapons, but of the king’s many vanquished citizens—and possibly the king too—now willingly embracing the loss of weaponry. The icon of the sheep as the brilliant central motif of this space turns the basilica upside down, making it light as air, floating with its inhabitants, like astronauts, in a new order of gravity. The Roman public building has gone from law court, institution of human violence, to an outer/inner space of grace, the transformed dimensions of nonviolent human being. Centuries of Christianity as business-as-usual has masked this transformation catastrophically, but now little by little its deep revolution in human space is being recognized for what it is, in and through spontaneous eruptions like this basilica on the shores of the Adriatic. 

GUNS, GODS, AND NEW HUMANITY

Anthropo-theology, ,

How can you write humanly about something inhuman: the massacre of nineteen elementary school children, plus two teachers, by a random gunman armed with weapons of war? Don’t we need another way of talking, another idiom, one that is actually inhuman, to describe it? Nothing else can do.

The events in Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, TX, belong to a background of school shootings stretching back over twenty years. Names like Columbine, Sandy Hook, Stoneman Douglas, are signature items in a roll call of social doom able to strike anywhere, anytime, without anyone able to do anything to stop it. The present resulting age of constant extreme social anxiety is the definition of the loss of functional humanity.

Some commentators reach back to themes of child sacrifice to explain things, and this, I think, is a language close to what might fit. But it is still not inhuman enough. After all, sacrifice, even child sacrifice, is something human beings have frequently done, as the Bible attests. What makes it intelligibly human is that it is intended to resolve a communal problem of stress, fear and anxiety, by channeling the group crisis onto a designated victim, and so allowing everyone else to find some level of overall meaning, order and well-being in their lives. But school shootings (and mass shootings generally) have no feasible outcome of communal success and well-being. Rather they serve only to increase anxiety, fear, anger, desperation, and further breakdown. If anything, they are actually anti-sacrificial: fraying the bonds of social cohesion and meaning, leading only to further eruptions of crisis and violence. School shootings are the mark of breakdown in the construct of human community itself.

The theoretical anthropologist, René Girard, had a term for this. It is a vital concept to help us understand the present situation. The term is “sacrificial crisis.” This means a situation where the effects of sacrificial order—the basis for Girard of human culture—are so eroded that violence can break out massively and anywhere in a constant attempt to re-found the world. He is talking about the cyclical nature of human violence at the root of culture, and situations where its built-in instability has overtaken its temporary stability. It is de facto a situation of terrible anxiety where human society begins desperately to look for a new scapegoat or victim, so that it can feel better about itself and go along with its business as before. But the single shooter does not seek this sacrificial solution, and the gun lobby behind him, that protects his ability to acquire the instrument of random killing, is likewise not interested in this outcome. They are not thinking humanly, in the way that all other cultures seem to have thought. Something else is going on.

What Girard did not specifically identify is what should be called the institutionalization of sacrificial crisis. Rather than resolve its tensions in a new sacred order, this condition finds its meaning and purpose in a permanent state of open violence, with each separate horror part of a rolling crisis which is its own overall justification. The option depends on a quite particular set of circumstances, including large landmass and material resources not threatened by local breakdown, a society of intense rivalry and competition, a background history of armed violence against minority groups, a founding legal document seeming to enshrine the right to carry guns unconditionally, and available weaponry of extreme power capable of killing many people in a very short space of time.

Sound familiar?

These circumstances create their own spiritual condition which must be understood in and for itself, and that indeed has to be the point. Human beings have never quite known anything like this before, and so the situation has to be considered effectively inhuman; or so novel for humans that they lack any intelligible language to talk about it. The permanent state of open violence becomes its own way of being in the world, brought about by the particular circumstances described, but taking on an independent godlike status. In the past the godlike associations of violence would have been rolled quickly back into a given religious/sacrificial system, but today they carry a free-floating identity as self-vindicating open violence. They are a god without a face.

Unless the anonymous face is perhaps the gun itself.

The gun kills, the gun continues to kill, the gun is immune from blame, the gun must therefore be a god. For many this is a noxious, inhuman god, one that is not tolerable for any society. But for many others this is a god that indeed may not be questioned. Those who feel this latter way are in the unique situation of espousing a religious emotion in relation to something that functions in an inverse way to religion.

It carries out sacrificial violence, but it gathers no community; it kills its victims but creates no peace; it exercises its priesthood, but considers nothing sacred; it enacts its logic, but produces no meaning. This is inhuman, but it is real.

Because this is a spiritual condition it is not sufficient to double down on attempts to blame, including the gun itself. Mobilizing the community to cast out the evil thing with anger and righteousness will only repeat the dynamics of violence and get more people armed. Blaming the gun ends with people carrying more guns. What is needed instead is an equal and alternative novelty of spirituality, one that responds to the inhumanity of the gun with, in fact, a new humanity. There has to be a revolutionary discovery of nonviolence and compassion, the willingness not to respond to violence with violence, the opening of new transcendent space of peace and forgiveness that deliberately and radically lets go of the gun.

How can this happen? I’m sure in fact that it’s already happening in many individual stories and lives, but what is necessary in addition is this become a theme, a motif, talked about more and more at the level of commentary, of politics, school, and church and college teaching. Politicians are opportunists by nature, and they respond instinctively to whatever’s in the wind. Even if a fresh spirituality of nonviolence is a minority persuasion, a strong and consistent theology of nonviolence arising in Christian communities will inevitably give energy and voice to common-sense policies of gun-harm reduction. In the end spirituality is what makes society, and the lack of consistent spirituality of nonviolence allows the gridlock of gun politics to persist and persist. We seem to be locked into the anger of the gun itself, with both sides of the debate, figuratively at least, pointing guns at each other. A breakthrough of new humanity in the face of the inhuman is instead the only possible fresh meaning in the impasse.

The very deficit of humanity becomes the possibility of transformed humanity. Are we not in the time itself when the nonviolent spirituality of Jesus arises as the most practical way forward?

Canaries, Cages, Covid and Compassion

Anthropo-theology, Movies

The proverbial canary is in its cage. Someone opens the door. The pretty bird steps out, looks around, and goes straight back behind bars.

The liberator’s definition of freedom may look like the end of the world to its feathered beneficiary, even if from the outside the caged canary might seem deprived.

On the other hand, if you make a cage big and rich enough and put lots of canaries and other songbirds in there together, suddenly they produce a society and a culture that has its own definition and assertion. Maybe then the cage becomes a problem to everyone around it, because it is using up so many resources to create its gilded lifestyle, and because, incidentally, the birds make a whole lot of noise. Nevertheless and all the same, the cage continues to deny freedom to its captives.

I once visited a community in Latin America where the rooms of all the brothers were set on a gallery around a central courtyard. Someone had the bright idea of building a huge aviary in the courtyard, reaching from the ground to the roof. The birds were certainly pretty, but the first morning I was there I was awakened by this deafening blast of competing birdsong breaking out at 4.20 am, an atrocious kind of alarm-clock. Needless to say, I got away from that house and its hellish chorus at the first possible opportunity.

Is it possible that aspects of the culture and society of North America are comparable to that exaggerated aviary? North America is very large, it has an idiosyncratic sense of freedom, it makes an ear-splitting noise proclaiming it, and yet in certain respects it is still a cage. Stepping outside the aviary seems like catastrophe to many Americans.

American freedom is built upon a gigantic landmass discovered by Europeans at a point when their technological development was taking off, enabling them rapidly to assert control over the territory, its indigenous peoples, and its resources. The wide-open spaces and the relative swiftness of expansion became a sense of freedom, a phenomenon of effortless power, movement and destiny. Allied to Enlightenment values of equality, individual liberty and rights, the experience was intoxicating and defining. Soon, just behind the gun, the cotton gin, the smelting yard and the railway, came the movie camera. Not only did this freedom express itself concretely in the prairies, the mountains, the rivers, it mirrored itself to itself in an endless stream of films, set against the magnificent backdrop and following the relentless movement of humanity across it.

We also have to bear in mind what this movement of humanity was getting away from. Poverty, landlords, oppression, pogroms, all such was left behind with only the new spaces rolling out in front, “from sea to shining sea.” No wonder all the birds in the aviary sung their hearts out!

But the fact remains that this is a unique and specialized society, spiritually and materially walled off from the rest of the planet and, of course, from aspects and sub-sets of its own territory and peoples. Because no matter the crowing of the cocks and hens true freedom still lies beyond the walls of this self-constructed cage.

Concepts of individual liberty come from specific and privileged circumstances like North America and the English bourgeoisie on the crest of industrial growth and great comparative wealth. In contrast the industrial working classes in Britain and France developed a sense of identity over against the rampant individualism of the factory owners, bankers and financiers. Necessarily this was a class identity, involving the whole mass of workers, combining their power against the might of the individual owners and their top-of-the-crop families.

It is this class identity which came to color what is called “socialism,” and now so offends U.S. sensibilities, pitting a brute, ugly collectivism against the ideal beauty of the individual. The ugly “starling” collectivism is what the canaries sing against day after day, trumpeting their unique private beauty to anyone in earshot.

But the truth remains theirs is not private beauty. As underlined, it was attained and is maintained by public means, in a particular time and space, channeling exceptional privilege to the fortunate citizens within its continental boundaries. Meanwhile, there is another version of beauty and freedom which the canaries can hardly conceive, so hostile are they to what they see as the massed ranks of collective unfreedom. This is a freedom outside of their cage which they reject because they feel happier in their five-star confine.

The freedom outside the cage is created by the power of compassion. To share the life of every other creature in the world, by means of the emotion that makes us one with them even in their suffering, this is to open an endless breadth of human relation. If freedom is the sense of movement and the possibility of engaging it anytime anywhere, then the freedom of compassionate relation is infinite, while the defense of privilege is a cage. The recent politicization over Covid safety demonstrates much of what is at stake. In a recent op-ed in the New York Times Charlie Warzel compared the furor over mandated masks to the politics surrounding gun rights and the human consequences that flow from them.

“As in the gun control debate, public opinion, public health and the public good seem poised to lose out to a select set of personal freedoms. But it’s a child’s two-dimensional view of freedom — one where any suggestion of collective duty and responsibility for others become the chains of tyranny.”

Warzel goes on to say, “In this narrow worldview, freedom has a price, in the form of an “acceptable” number of human lives lost. It’s a price that will be calculated and then set by a select few. The rest of us merely pay it.” This may seem a harsh judgment but explained as the canaries’ addiction to their aviary it makes full sense. Warzel’s assessment was underlined by an editorial piece in the same newspaper on Aug 6, reporting America’s “unique failure” to get the pandemic under national control. “First, the United States has a tradition of prioritizing individualism over government restrictions. That aversion to collective action helped lead to inadequate state lockdowns and inconsistent adherence to mask wearing based on partisanship instead of public health.”

As in gun rights the public health failure of Covid response is not an unfathomable mystery. Guns belong to the technology by which mastery over the Americas was asserted. In the hands of individuals, it provides the cumulative power of a king and army, expressed in a single trigger burst. It provides the individual with the rule of a monarch over an alien and hostile world. L’etat c’est moi! In comparison, Covid is a tiny virus, something which reverses the perspective but maintains the metaphor. Now the power is a minute pathogen set against the Leviathan of the individual. Thus, “It shall not pass,” not because of a humble, other-conscious mask, but purely by royal decree!

What is unique about humans is their limitless power of relation. As Rene Girard has shown us, this can result in unending rivalry, the source of wars and killing. Or, the very same mimetic connection can bring community, compassion and love. In the past this relation has been called “socialism” but there is an inherited element of class conflict in that political tradition, one that makes the canaries sing all the louder in opposition. Compassion, instead, invites everyone into a more deeply human life, one without violence. Indeed, if humans are to survive at all on earth then compassion must become a necessary way of life, rather than an occasional fit of sentiment. Compassion then might be called a “new socialism,” if by that we mean the compassionate elements clearly present in the old tradition now come front and center in a mode of positive human transformation. The current cultural crisis in response to Covid (and, afterward, to its aftermath) throws up the possibility of seeing everything from a revolutionary new angle. Many Americans already share a great sense of compassion. It is simply a matter of making this a human and political virtue in its own right.

Heart Attack!

Anthropo-theology, Poetry

It’s just about a year since a heart-attack knocked me off my CASUAL perch (Carelessly Assured Serenely Uninterrupted Animate Life). A single year, I suppose, is not a whole lot of time for a commemoration, but the fact of my survival, and the alternative, make it seem a whole lot of lifetimes. All those little things that happen in everyday existence, all the hopes and dreams that continue to swirl inside your head and make life so much, well, life, none of that would exist at all for the last year if I had made my exit. How precious then is that space of time, how much worthy of a celebration!

Human body with heart, with aorta ventricle, left atrium, right atrium, superior vena cava, inferior vena cava and artery, on black background.
Human body with heart, with aorta ventricle, left atrium, right atrium, superior vena cava, inferior vena cava and artery

Besides, I also completed my thirty-six sessions of cardiac rehab, becoming part of a select community of similarly aged men, plus (for some reason) a lesser number of women, all recently made conscious of their acute fragility this side of eternity. We had such a huge sense of something in common, as we hit the treadmills and exercise bikes, that we continually talked about going out for beer and pizza together. But when it came to it, we couldn’t bring ourselves. I suspect it would have felt too much like a reunion of ghosts at the local funeral parlor!

So, instead, I will try to celebrate by writing something rising from the experience and I would never have thought of before: a dialogue between a man and his own heart. You see, you never think of your heart as separate from yourself, until gnaws in your chest like a wild dog trying madly to get out. That’s when you realize that the heart is a muscle with a life of its own, and you really have to start paying attention to it.

Oh, my dear heart, what did I ever do to you for you to treat me this way?

You never cared before, you took me entirely for granted!

But how was I to know? You were so quiet and gentle, always there day and night, with your peaceful little beat, you made me take you for granted! How was I to know you could get so angry? pexels-photo-1820510

Give me a break! You were always saying creepy things like “Cross your heart and hope to die!” “Eat your heart out!” “I heart you!” You knew exactly how important I was. But it never occurred to you to figure out what really made me tick? If you had a muscle strain in your leg or arm you would talk about it non-stop. But the most serious muscle in your body, you thought I worked by magic.

C’mon now. Calm down. You’re taking it all too much to heart!  (Sorry, I thought that was funny!) I was always talking about you, and in a positive way! We always said, “Follow your heart,” “The heart has its reasons which reason doesn’t have.”  All that cool romantic stuff! You had to be pleased!

Yes, and what about, “The heart is devious above all else, it is perverse,” All that Jeremiah stuff! I would get so sick and tired hearing about how wicked I was. Bad heart

Well, yes, there is that. But you have to admit, you did lead me astray a number of times

Whaattt! It was nothing to do with me, it was you with your sick imagination, I’m just a supply of motion to the propeller, it’s you and your precious brain that steers the ship!

So, you’re totally innocent. You’ve never done anything wrong?

No, I have not. I am innocent, and you are a jerk.

Listen, you’re being far too literal about everything. When we say “heart” in casual conversation we’re using a metaphor for the deepest, most essential part of the self. We’re not talking about you, that eleven-ounce muscle about the size of an average fist lodged in our chest. You have to make allowance for human language use.

So, now I’m too stupid to understand when people are talking about me, and when they mean something else. Well, let me tell you, you don’t have a word for that something else, because you don’t know what it is. But in the meantime, the truth is I AM the most essential thing in your life, I am the main event, but you don’t give me the respect you should. That whole metaphor thing is your way of wriggling out of the facts

But you just said it was my brain that made me do stuff, and now you say you really are the mainspring of life. Which is it?

I’m not arguing the point with you. You started the whole conversation because you said I’d treated you poorly. The fact is you didn’t know what I do, and now when I showed you, you come on like I’m behaving badly. But, really, I’ve always been that way, the passion of your life at its core, and you’ve been totally fine with it. I just gave you a wake-up call and now you have to change your whole way of understanding. lionYou have a lion of desire where you thought there was a sweet little puppy, and, more to the point, the lion’s no longer locked up in its cage.

That’s crazy, really crazy. I’m not sure I want to be talking to you like this. You suddenly become this lion all untamed, and about to tear itself free from me, but somehow you always were that way, and now it’s too late for me to do anything about it! What happened to “sweetheart,” to compassion, to the heart’s heart for the weak and wounded!

There you go again, saying stuff about me for things you actually can’t make sense of. Well, I would like to help you, I really would. And maybe I will feel better about it next week, or next year. But in the meantime, I have got your attention and that makes me happy. I’m just a muscle, like you say, and my operating life has a term limit, what do you say, a shelf life? All that other stuff you talk about, you’ll have to figure that out without me.

Well, that does make sense. I do see what you mean about my sloppy metaphors, making you responsible for things which we don’t have names for. So, what happens to those things when your angry lion does finally break free? Where will my real “heart” be then? sun heart

I guess you’ll have to wait and see. Maybe, if you get the chance, you could even let me know too!

Madness and Priesthood

Anthropo-theology

I was ordained in 1973, and resigned the priesthood in 1984.

In the Roman Catholic church priesthood is a lifelong commitment, including its core social marker, lifelong celibacy. To jump ship and get married is not even technically possible according to Canon Law (you can’t escape a solemn vow), let alone something viewed as an honorable course of action.

It is legally possible to be “returned to the lay state”–on the basis it was all a total mistake in the first place–but my own petition for dispensation disappeared in some clerical desk-drawer around 1986, and I never felt inclined to try again. I preferred to remain in the odd clinical condition which is my true and real vocation.

My mother was mentally ill—borderline psychotic, for sure. Her presenting symptoms photo-1553465528-5a213ccc0c7bwere chronic underlying depression, triggered by postpartum crisis. But on its own this does not account for her rages which were the real pathology. Her anger was directed mostly at my father. He was not only personally culpable (for whatever grave sin she found him in), but he served as a stand-in for the general evil of England responsible for millennial Irish grievance. Although my father bore the brunt of my mother’s blitzkrieg, it was also capable of wiping the whole house clean of air and life more terminally than any atom bomb. It was not surprising I developed chronic asthma trying to vent the firestorm. But it was not enough. It could not remake a world after the apocalypse. For that only priesthood would do.

From a very early age “the priest” was the only figure of manhood put before me of any value. A paragon of virtue, truth, power, beauty, humanity. At the same time, I had my own strange, personal connection to things of the spirit, a powerful, individual relation to the man from Nazareth which in fact stood outside of the architecture of the Roman church. I also learned to pray, a constant inner exercise of breath, reaching out for life beyond the gutted atmosphere of my personal spaceship drifting on the far side of the moon.

Back then, however, spirituality and the Catholic church were impossibly intertwined and created a recipe that could only enhance the madness of my soul and social situation.

When I finally quit the priesthood—motivated in large part by the healing touch and 4182liberating teaching of the man from Nazareth—I was able to distinguish between the meaning and impact of the Christian scriptures and tradition, and the self-serving historical structures of the church. Nevertheless, there was one thing that would not change. I could remove the the man from the madness, but I could not remove the madness from the man.

I had learned more thoroughly than a musical prodigy learns the piano. I exercised my personal priesthood from the age of six or seven forward, ministering to and mediating my mother’s depression and anger. There will be some other place where I tell the full story, but for now it’s simply a fact that I am specialist in any person who stands in the outside space, beyond the “normal” mores and values of the world. Psychosis—in one social form or other—is my wheelhouse.

Leaving the official priesthood was a necessary option for my sanity, for real connection to the world. If I had not done it there’s no doubt, I would have driven some group of people seriously nuts, or gone entirely nuts myself … or both. As it is, I have a wife and children who keep me grounded, and coming to the United States enabled me to breathe air whose atoms have not been ripped from the earth at the first dawning of conscious life. My mother responded to my bid for sanity by effectively never speaking to me again. I was to be forever outside her comforting mania.

All the same, as I say, I retain a priesthood of the borderlines. And at this point I have no desire to change. Madness comes one person at a time. If you go into a psychiatric hospital, there may be fifty patients, but each is largely lost in their own world. It’s difficult to conceive of a “church” of the mad. So it is that the ministry that I have learned at my mother’s knee always seems to be to the scattered, marginal few.

But. But.

The world is now in a place where what is “normal” is more and more deranged, both in photo-1564576605322-4ec6420782d9the breakdown of nature, and in the constantly reinforced twittermania of competing voices, such that “truth” is evaporated in the internet media. Madness is becoming a way of being, and in a world of the culturally insane the ordinarily crazy may actually have a new wisdom to impart. A priesthood of madness may be the path on which we meet the man from Nazareth more surely than down the aisle of any classically proportioned cathedral. After all, what is it that drives people insane, and what is that heals them? Is it not always some form of violence that pushes them over the edge, and is it not the touch of divine nonviolence which heals?

Any priesthood today worth its salt has to be a priesthood of madness. (I think of Luis Buñuel film, Nazarín, where the priest’s constant literal practice of the gospel makes him seem crazy and a failure. But there is always a deep ambiguity and the power of the images overcomes the harsh details of the plot. It is the images (the signs) of love and compassion that endure.MV5BYjQ4ZGUyNDItYTNjMS00MDRkLTg0YjItMjA4NzhhMmZkYzI2XkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyNTc2MDU0NDE@._V1_UY268_CR3,0,182,268_AL_

Terry Was My Brother

Anthropo-theology, Poetry

This is a quite personal response to my brother’s death. I am posting it here, among my other blogs, because I wish these words as a farewell to Terry, and I had no other public setting in which to deliver them.

I do not remember his birth–there were under two years between us. But I remember him being there, a new and constant presence among my mother’s things-to-do and bright roses on the wall of the back yard in 1949. He lay in his pram and I didn’t know his face but I knew he was somebody and he was there.

He was there when my aunt screamed in panic up the stairs, telling me and my older sister to get out of the bathroom and come down and shelter with the rest of the family under the kitchen table. A firework display in a nearby park resulted in loud explosions, and my mother and aunt were certain Hitler had come back and launched a deadly attack with rockets.

Everything in those days was after-the-war, and that went on all the way through until the sixties. Terry and his whole generation came of age in the sixties.

Before that decade most of our growing up was in the out-of-the-way Isle of Wight. We moved to the island in 1953, taking the ferry from Portsmouth across the shallow strip of water separating it from the English mainland. It was a strange place whose isolation was chosen by the authorities as ideal setting for a maximum security prison, H.M.P. Parkhurst. Our father worked as a Prison (Corrrections) Officer and had taken a job in Parkhurst as a hospital orderly, no doubt attracted by special wage incentives. For five years we shared the situation of those detained at the center of the island. Our only external reference points were the Catholic Church, St. Thomas in Newport, and our primary school, Carisbrooke Convent, with its looming feudal backdrop of a Norman castle.

Terry formed part of a trio, with myself and our younger sister, banded together in a hard, unlikely world. We played around the housing estate where the families of the prison officers lived, or on the clifftop farm where our mother had purchased an ex-army billet hut as unofficial family camp. Terry was a seamless part of that insular childhood experience: pretending to be pirates, climbing trees, following trails, building forts, creating a story saga around our toy plastic Indians, running away from gangs, confronting bullies.

He was intensely loyal. After we first moved and started at our convent primary school–which of course was not the local state school–a bunch of prison kids would steal our caps and rough us up as we walked home from the bus-stop. Deciding on a guerilla tactic we hid in the bushes and jumped on one of the meanest boys who was about our size, pummeling him with our little fists. Our success in dealing with this boy encouraged us to move on to the leader who was head and shoulders above us both. Again we jumped from the bushes, but he handed us a solid pasting and we had to turn and run. My brother took his lumps without flinching. And after that the gang did not bother us again.

Terry’s loyalty was a given, demonstrated time and again throughout his life. But there is passion which cuts deeper even than loyalty. We choose whom we are loyal to; passion chooses its objects for us. The objects of Terry’s passion, who knows? But they were certainly there.

The family moved to Portsmouth at the end of the island sojourn, but in a way we remained our own little island, enclosed in family bounds of church and home. It was only after we started to set out on individual life journeys that the wider world really confronted us, stretching loyalties while provoking passions. One time Terry came to visit me as a young man. It was likely the winter of 1968. I was at Buckden Towers, an historically B-list medieval building, just off the Great North Road, but displaying a noble skyline of castellated walls and three-storied keep. There was a fundraiser underway, with lots of alcohol, disco lights and music. Terry was working at a pig farm at the time, shortly after he had been told to leave the seminary in Ireland and never try a vocation to the priesthood anywhere else. He had a huge Afro haircut, long black greatcoat and a hacking cough. There were flecks of straw in his hair and on his coat, and his conversation was largely about how smart pigs were. It looked like he’d been living with them, just like the proverbial Prodigal Son. After he downed a few drinks he made his way to the roof of the Towers and stood looking out from the shaky battlements, glass in hand. I’d never seen him so dark, and felt it necessary to go back to check on him. What was he staring at as he gazed over the walls into the cold, inky night?  I never really knew, but it was desperate and terrible.

Terry

Somehow the Terry of his twenties dealt with his demons. And in so doing he helped me a great deal. More than he really knew. One of the reasons I went to spend time with him in England before he died was to tell him how much he meant to me in my own life. Somewhere in the same period as that dark visit to Buckden, Terry came to see me at another place where I was staying, a house in Oxfordshire attached to a Jesuit teaching institution, Heythrop College. We stayed up late in the community kitchen warmed by the big black Aga stove, and Terry told me about a book he’d read, Catcher in the Rye. We shared Holden Caulfield’s corrosive contempt for phony situations and people. Most of all, I saw my brother Terry standing up to be his own person in a difficult world, in a way that I had yet to manage. I saw that in many ways he was braver and more mature than me.

Others of Salinger’s novels made an ever greater impression on Terry. Those relating the story of the prodigiously talented Glass family, Raise High The Roof Beams, Carpenter and Franny and Zooey, were particularly beloved. At every opportunity he would praise these books as having a near-biblical worth. Why did Terry value so highly a story about a guy named Seymour who did not show up at his own wedding and a few years later committed suicide, yet whose memory and writings remained a spiritual treasure for his family?

In the light of this question, it is impossible not to mention my own wedding in 1986, and the fact that Terry did indeed show up, and did so to protest. He was grateful to be escorted out of the church before the beginning of the service by the best man and ushers, but he waited at the gate until the ceremony was over. It was a bit of a shock to see his ravaged face as I and Linda emerged in the courtyard to the strains of the Wedding March. This was another instance of loyalty–Terry took my mother’s part when she saw my getting married as legally inadmissible (given that I had taken a vow of celibacy in the R.C. church). I know Terry–certainly the Holden Caulfield Terry–did not want to do this, but blood overruled him. (At the same time, in hindsight, I cannot help but find more than a little subversive irony in Terry’s protest: in the end he was the only one of my family actually to show up at the wedding!)

Before all that happened, during the late 70’s, Terry came to work with me at Buckden Towers. He had returned to his studies and got a degree from UMIST, but when he was at a loose end after graduation I asked him to join me at the Towers. That half-millennial pile had emerged as a center of an energetic youth ministry fired by the spiritual renewal taking place in those years. The year he spent at Buckden was a happy time. He had undergone his own progressively deepened spiritual experience and this, together with his genial manner, Woodbine cigarettes and scorching left-wing analysis made him an object of both affection and fascination for the young people who would gather there. For me personally he represented a support I did not find in the religious order to which I belonged. When he left the Towers, that, and a number of other factors, began my own step by step separation from the life I was in. It was a journey which would result in a final break in 1984, and then that rather ill-tempered wedding two years later.

Terry took my mother’s part, but then he saw it as his job to effect a kind of reconciliation. After eight years he managed to get her to agree to meet me. It was an odd encounter but Terry saw it as a duty accomplished, squaring his loyalties both to her and to me. A few years later he also managed to arrange a meeting between my mother and my children–none of whom she had seen. My older two remember it and I am glad they had the chance of at least one physical memory of their grandmother. Terry was very satisfied that he had connected these pieces of the puzzle. Shortly before he died he bought Claddagh rings for each of my kids–“hands across the ocean”–and I know he was pleased that he had preserved that bit of the family heritage somewhat against the odds.

Terry never married. When the Irish say this about an older man they tend to do so with a mixture of sadness and approval. As if there is something quite noble about the solitary state–more often than not a matter of selfless service to said individual’s mother. There were apparently a couple of close brushes with the opposite sex. He told me about a woman from Iceland, and another from the Caribbean who had three children. When informed about the latter our mother remarked along the lines of “So, who would look after me?” And that, as they say, was that. But I never got the feeling these were huge losses for Terry. Whatever his passion was it carried him gracefully along the tracks of bachelorhood. (He once said to me–somewhere to the latter part of my own time in a religious order–“I think I would be better suited to your life, and you would be to mine.”)

So, about that attempt of his to be a priest? When he was eighteen Terry joined a Catholic missionary organization and seminary in Dublin, Ireland, but after a year he was told to leave. He wandered around Dublin for a couple of days, before finally heading back to England. It was following this he took work on the pig farm. To be told not to try anywhere else meant his superiors saw something they deemed a deal-breaker, not simply a poor fit. It’s impossible to know at this distance what that was; and why should I even bother? Well, it seemed Terry left money in his will to this same organization. The end of his life and his dispositions for his estate mirror something right at its outset, and they look like some kind of settling of accounts. My personal opinion is that we can never settle accounts: life is a free gift, and whatever we take from it can only be compensated by more absolutely free giving. And indeed, this could also have been what my brother was doing in a roundabout Zen way! However, why give freely to this organization, when there are so many urgent needs in the world?

Ultimately it is about where your passion lies, and it was perhaps the day of his death that displayed this most poignantly in Terry.

As it turned out I was alone with him. We’d had visits from the Cancer specialist and the Palliative Care doctor; one expected Terry to recover, the other that he still had weeks to live. Before that, about 11.00am, I prayed with him, giving thanks for Terry’s whole life and asking for various blessings on relatives and the world. The room was full of morning sun, Terry was very peaceful, his face and breathing in repose. The one point where he roused himself to an “Amen” was when we prayed for the R.C. church.

The priest came around 2.00. His name was Fr. Sean and he said one word, “Terry,” and my brother came out of his doze as if he’d been touched by an electric probe. He tried to lever himself up on his pillows and at the same time he tore off his oxygen mask. At this point his saturation levels were between 70 and 50 on pure O2 which means it was very dangerous to remove the mask. (Anything less than 90 is low.) We called the nurse and she got the mask back on again. The moment she left he pulled it off once more and this time his eyes rolled up and he went unconscious. I put the mask back on and his eyes returned to focus. I was now standing guard and the priest proceeded with communion and anointing. I extended the mask off his face for him to receive the wafer and sprung it straight back. When it came to the anointing Terry held out his arms rigidly in front of him like someone doing a strength exercise or some kind of parade ground salute. The muscles of his upper arms began to buckle and pop but he held the position with superhuman will-power until the priest had finished putting the oil on his hands. I don’t know why Fr. Sean didn’t tell him to relax and put his hands down on the covers.

The priest left. Shortly after they brought some lunch. Terry had a few mouthfuls and a sip or two of juice. I went out myself to get a drink. When I got back his breathing had changed. Terry died at 3.40. Without any kind of struggle. He just slipped away. His passion done.

Last year, shortly after Terry was first diagnosed with cancer, he sent me this message. “Thankfully I have not been really worried or concerned by the cancer. Do you remember the old hymn or poem that ended, ‘The child of God can fear no ill, his chosen dread no foe, we leave our fate to thee and wait thy bidding when we go; it’s not from chance our comfort springs, Thou are our trust, O king of kings.’ Guess I must actually believe that.”

Flashback. It’s 1979, and Buckden again. It’s the end of the summer and I am having an asthma attack. I was hardly getting episodes at all in those days, and yet somehow I feel this one is dangerous. I ask Terry to sleep in the room next to me, not confident I could get anyone in the community to respond promptly or sympathetically. Sure enough, in the small hours it is a crisis. I knock desperately on the wall and Terry does not need to be asked twice. He at once summons the doctor. The man arrives with his Gladstone, gets out a needle and shoots me with adrenalin. The transformation is immediate, miraculous. I have never quite experienced anything like it, before or since. Free flowing breath and a strong heart, who would not give the skies above for this? I pray that my brother Terry gets some crazy other-than-medical adrenalin in those small hours and remote rooms we call death.

Subversive Semiotics: Scorsese’s Not-So-Silent “Silence”

Anthropo-theology, Movies

The latest film from auteur, Martin Scorsese, continues his fascination with Christian themes, evident from his very first movies and climaxing in 1988 with The Last Temptation of Christ. But this 2016 offering delves more deeply than his earlier preoccupations and easy box-office draws of guilt, sex and death. Centered on the empty space where faith lives, the whole movie shudders with the terror and joy of living in that space. As such it is by far Scorsese’s most religious movie, one which turns in near orbit to the heart of Christian meaning. In the words of the Newsweek review it “feels close to a state of grace.” download (1) - Copy

Silence tells the story of Jesuit priests fallen foul of 17th century Japanese state policy to root out Christianity from the nation, concentrating particularly on the coastal areas of Nagasaki where the faith of Jesus has gained a foothold. The film is based on the 1966 novel of the same name by Shusaku Endo. The movie narrative remains faithful to the cruel dilemma presented in the book and, on one level, to its title theme, communicated with echoing intensity in the written story, that of God’s apparent silence in the face of appalling suffering.

But Scorsese as director does not just tell a story, he presents us with a sumptuous gallery of scenes and images. The sea and its beating waves are a constant motif, signaling the unbridgeable isolation of the Jesuit missionaries, way beyond return to their native Portugal. The implacable sea is also an instrument of torture for the island Christians, hung on crosses before the incoming tide, battered and swamped until their spirits give out. But then there is this. download - Copy

The image of Christ is also continuously represented– hung on the cross, the Lamb of God standing defenceless, or a face gazing serene and unflinching out into the world. It is this portraiture–always itself a figure of torture–which acts as an unyielding counterpoint to the brutal campaign of violence carried out by the authorities.

The dilemma standing before the priests is, first, whether or not to advocate apostasy among the Japanese Christians rather than see them continue to suffer this campaign, and then, ultimately, whether or not to apostatize themselves–the last condition for its cessation. Our attention is riveted by this enforced decision, but underlying it and informing it all the way through is a profound, often mind-bending discussion on what is actually at stake.

Toward the end of the movie the central Jesuit character, Rodrigues (Andrew Garfield), has a conversation with his former teacher and mentor, a Jesuit who has already apostatized, Ferreira (Liam Neeson). Ferreira tells him that the Japanese Christians are not real Christians, because the word used for “the Son of God” is the same Japanese expression as for the midday sun! They do not believe in “Deus” (scholastic Latin for “God”), so why put them through torture for the sake of a phony belief!

This is an argument by one priest to another. Meanwhile the Japanese authorities have something quite different bothering them. They are concerned to keep encroaching Western nations out of Japan–Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands. And they see Christianity as a bridgehead for this encroachment. Their concern was doubtless valid, but as they argue with Rodrigues they claim that Christianity cannot possibly take root in Japan because it was alien to its soil. Saying so they somehow manage to ignore the multiple thousands of existing Christian converts, plus their own ferocious effort to eradicate what is apparently unable to put down roots. Essentially, however, their argument is not empirical. They are claiming on authority to decide what takes root and what cannot. They are the shogunate officer and warrior class, the appointed curators of what is Japanese.

In the course of this authoritative argument, however, they quote a Japanese saying and suddenly we are at another level altogether. “Mountains and rivers can be moved. But man’s nature cannot be moved.” I do not think this line is in Endo’s book, in which case the screenwriting of Silence adds a crucial twist, suggesting that the thing at stake is not who is in charge, but what, in the end, it means to be human.

RInc7GKThis is a hugely different question and it is at this level that the repeated images of Christ–unfailingly nonretaliatory and nonviolent–transcend the eponymous silence of God. Indeed, the test of apostasy is to trample on an image of Christ and this gives Scorsese endless occasions throughout the movie to render a powerful semiotics of the nonretaliation of the Christ. Jesus again and again has a foot planted on his face and not once is there a glimmer of revenge.

Is not this perhaps the deafening “silence” that is complained about? The fact that the God of Jesus cannot and will not intervene violently, even to end abusive violation of his own revealed image? In any case, the authorities are obsessively concerned to eliminate these symbols of Jesus when kept by Christians, sensing that somehow they are key to the meaning and communication of the faith. I do not know what the actual attitude of the Nagasaki Christians or the authorities was toward the images–whether or not they regarded them superstitiously as some kind of object-with-power. But there can be no doubt that Scorsese choreographs the figures and faces for their iconic value, representing exactly the other nature which the saying about mountains and rivers deemed impossible.

In which case Ferreira–at least in the world of the movie–was entirely wrong. The Japanese Christians were real Christians, because they treasured the nonviolent semiotics of the cross. In Silence Scorsese has articulated, as artist and director, a clamant cinema of Jesus’ nonretaliation and its ultimate victory. The final frame of the movie and its sudden close-up makes this unquestionable. If you have not seen the movie treat yourself for the sake of all the wonderful screenplay, but above all the “apocalyptic” (revelatory) finale.

Silence speaks louder than words, louder than apostasy itself.

Alien: Covenant. A Satan Worth Seeing!

Anthropo-theology, Movies

(Warning: thematic spoilers.)

Ridley Scott’s Alien: Covenant (2017) is a meditation on actual human meaning painted across the aching canvas of outer space and set off by the placenta-toned hues of chest-bursting Xenomorphs, the undisputed cinema icons of human mimesis, misery and violence.

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The titular spaceship, “The Covenant,” is the painting’s golden frame, a beautiful artefact, gliding effortlessly across the stars like the bone-weapon flung triumphantly into the sky all those years ago in Stanley Kubrick’s classic 2001: A Space Odyssey. The craft carries 2000 chosen people plus embryos, pilgrim colonists, to a new home on a distant planet. But with whom do they make the covenant?

The film begins with a 2001: A Space Odyssey style conversation between computer intelligence and its human master. It is set in the exquisite calm of high culture, a white room with modernist picture window looking out on wilderness landscape, and masterpieces scattered around like a billionaire’s eat-your-heart-out collection, Carlo Bugatti throne, Steinway Grand Piano, Piero Della Francesca’s Nativity, an image of Michelangelo’s David, and, for audio, Wagner’s Entry of the Gods. The scene connects to the movie’s prequel, Prometheus (2012): it fills in that movie’s backstory of Peter Weyland, the said billionaire, funding a quest in space to find the origins of human existence, including his own selfish pursuit of immortality. Here he is talking to the android who is his creation and will help him in the quest. But it is not Weyland who is the most important figure in the scene; rather it is the creation who proceeds to name himself triumphantly after Michelangelo’s biblical David and then play the Nazi-favorite Wagner piece. He resents his role as servant. In the flicker of an eye we can see that he does not want to pour Weyland’s tea!

The Covenant sails on its light-speed journey with its covenant god watching over it. The constant connection with and contrast to the Judaeo-Christian narrative tells us that, along with the CGI thrills, there is a theological imagination at work. There is the Nativity artwork at the beginning, the eponym of the spacecraft, multiple (if somewhat incoherent) references to faith and belief, as well as several subtle nods to the gospel story.

But the god at work is not a biblical god of justice or peace. As imaged so powerfully by the Xenomorphs it is one of ferocious rivalry. In fact it is David who little by little emerges as Lucifer, a pure rival to his creator.

He explicitly quotes Milton’s Paradise Lost, “Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven” and talks eloquently of his superiority.

He claims precedence over humans because he knows his creator, and they do not, plus he can live indefinitely, and they cannot. But, at the same time, David has an intense case of creator envy. He longs to produce something as wonderful as poetry or music. He has fashioned primitive wind instruments for himself, but we cannot be sure whether what he plays is not plagiarised from human composers. However, what he really can do is create killing machines. Without giving too much away, we see that he does not hesitate to destroy, and on a metaphysical level, in his quest for superiority.

However, as you watch this drama unfold you begin to think that it is the very fact that humans do not know their creator with certainty that opens the space in them for compassion and, indeed, creativity. A machine can only mimic. A human has that empty space inside (parallel to the vastness of outer space) which allows them to give themselves, to surrender self to “empty space,” and in the moment allow something loving and new to be generated. If “a synthetic” (as David calls himself) should ever attain to that empty space it too could create and truly be equal to its creator.

David cannot or will not dissociate himself from rivalry with his maker. In which case, far from being purely a machine he is in fact a perfect image of the human! A robot-as-rival is a perfect movie image of the human filled up with the other as enemy. He or she is in lock-step with the other, always seeking to emulate and yet outdo. A rival is a robot, fixed mechanically to the being of the other, trying futilely to attain freedom in that last explosive theophany of conquest. This is the satan, the rival who cannot let go, who becomes a robot of desire, and will go down in flames rather than do so.

David is probably the best screen Satan ever. His is the “alien covenant,”  one of rivalry and violence, the one that will engulf the world in destruction unless we learn the empty space of forgiveness and love. If you’re in any way involved in teaching Christians about the meaning of their scripture, bring them to see and understand this movie!

(P.S. In the prequel, Prometheus, the main protagonist, Dr. Elizabeth Shaw, wore a cross around her neck, as a sign of overarching faith, something resented by David. In Alien: Covenant the main female protagonist, Daniels Branson,  wears an iron nail on a leather band around her neck. It has an ordinary meaning–she wants to build a log cabin on the new planet–but the contrast with Prometheus is unmistakable. Is the iron nail of Alien: Covenant the rivalry and violence that crucified Jesus? In the imaginal universe of movies it does not matter if a particular trope is fully intended by the director or not: the answer here has to be “Yes!” In the theological logic of these two movies a 21st century version of the work of the cross is becoming more and more difficult to miss.)

Primal Soup for Emerging “New Cell” Christianity

Anthropo-theology

I had a conversation with a priest friend. He described a more or less perfect “church campus” in a small North Eastern boutique town. There is the venerable town-center worship center, behind it an education facility, a couple of blocks away a rural poverty support program, and on the corner a second-hand store helping fund the social-service outreach. But despite its evident virtue the church campus is not attracting newcomers. The church is stagnant, in fact slowly dying.mr_00089689

What are they doing wrong?

Church and worship have to do with the in-breaking of transcendence, and it seems that the average citizen of the small town finds her transcendence elsewhere; or nowhere.

In fact old transcendence itself seems to be dying, and perhaps directly under the cultural impact of the gospel. Gone is the great-deity-on-high and with it the threat of eternal consequences, and instead there is a questioning of power itself and the violence that underpins it. The question could take us on several related rabbit trails (e.g. some churches specialize in preserving or restoring that sense of violent power within the four walls of their building), but let me stick to an image that struck me and I shared with my friend.

Life in an evolutionary sense emerged from a soup of proteins that somehow combined into the primitive single cell. The “somehow” is not the question. What is relevant is the background chaos of materials which provided the necessary environment from which life came. unnamed It is the “culture medium” which is critical in producing life.

The account of the first Pentecost tells us the Spirit created the first primitive church out of a babble of tongues. It hearkens us back to the story of the Tower of Babel in Genesis. According to Walter Brueggemann the scattering that the Lord brought about, produced by the confusion of tongues, was for the sake of a larger creative purpose of ingathering and unity. And of course we see that in the outpouring of Holy Spirit at Pentecost, the Spirit of boundary-breaking nonviolence overcoming difference and separation in forgiving love.

What if today we are witnessing another kind of scattering? One not signaled by diversity of languages (we have facebook to translate for us), but by the breakdown and chaos of even more closely identifying structures of specialness and difference. We have a fragmentation and dissonance within “natural” unities such as race, nation, gender, along with a media which heightens the discord with every voice, opinion and “alternative fact” as valid as the next. Fake news is the news: there is a breakdown of “truth” itself. And with that, of course, there is the critically heightened sense of violence, precisely because unified structures of meaning and truth–single narratives–are there to protect against rivalry and conflict, against violence itself.

This then is the culture medium where the gospel word should be searchoperating, in which it announces its alternative truth of unbounded love in the space of agitation and disarray. Respect for difference is not enough: there has to be the positive experience of transforming love “by which everyone will know you are my disciples.” This kind of love reaches out as well to those who feel impelled to recreate old unities for the sake of fending off the sense of violence. The fragmentation of “natural” unities is, therefore, in order to bring about a new kind of humanity. It is the creative space, like the confusion of languages, in which a genuinely new life of positive love can emerge. Without this present-day chaotic medium we would never be moved to produce this self-replicating “cell” of new human being.

Paradoxically, the gospel’s most natural sphere is not the settled order, but the place where the apparent virtues of such an order break down–in the lives of individuals who experience it as hurt and violence: the marginalized, the violated, the oppressed. The fact that the church campus I described is concerned for the poor cannot preclude that at some point it belongs itself to macro structures which create the poor (e.g. privilege, war, class etc.) The poor have always been blessed by the gospel, but today we have all entered a new kind of poverty where violence itself impoverishes our existence. And so that other beatitude, which is ineptly translated “blessed are the meek,” becomes first in significance. “Blessed are the nonviolent” is the joyful meaning of the gospel for those who consciously opt for it, out of a culture of violence, out of the generative roots of culture exposed to the light as violence.

So the gospel becomes the ability to live in this space with transcendent love, forgiveness and peace. Blessed are the nonviolent for they shall inherit the earth! 6273465171_a7b0885a35_b

Resurrection in a Time of Victims

Anthropo-theology

Resurrection is the beginning of another earth. And another heaven.

Resurrection–despite its general amazement factor as a miracle–has remained the poor relation of gospel theology: e.g. “incarnation” and “atonement.” crucifixion_Francis_Bacon_1933

For “the Second Person of the Trinity” resurrection kind of goes with the territory, and when it comes to dealing with human sin Jesus’ death is what really counts.

To understand the importance of the resurrection of Jesus, we must first make clear that resurrection cannot be separated from the cross. It is the resurrection of the Crucified victim.

See Paul’s famous statement in Philippians.

“I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of his suffering, being conformed to him in his death, so that I may somehow attain to the resurrection of the dead.”

You see here how entangled are the two themes. The statement is chiastic, with the resurrection at both ends, and the suffering and death as the cross-over in the middle. You cannot separate the two–they are like two twined strands of DNA. search

The Crucified is raised! And we have always to maintain this structural reality: it is the total overturning, through nonviolence, of a death sentence imposed by the powers of this world. Only on this basis can we understand Girard’s famous revelation of the victim. In terms of the gospel, it is only because the Crucified is raised as peace that we know the victim of collective human violence is innocent.

But today because the victim stares us in the face everywhere we continue to forget the structural event that made it happen. We separate the Crucified from Resurrection.

As hinted above, a lot of the blame for this must fall on past theology. In the past the teaching of resurrection was swallowed up by the function of the death. The death, not the resurrection, had exchange value. Jesus’s death was our substitution, not the resurrection. This death was in fact a meaning the world understood–it could deal with it and use it: an exchange with God through violence meant that violence still had a role. So then the resurrection becomes an afterthought, a remainder we are not sure what to do with, despite the fact that one part of the mystery of Christ’s act of redemption makes no structural sense without the other.

The resurrection is the culture of the New Testament in every sense.

The New Testament dwells within the Resurrection. It is unthinkable outside it. Every page, every word vibrates with its pivotal meaning. kellsfol032vchristenthroned

The resurrection of Jesus is a new language of human being. It is a definitively new point of reference in contradiction of the world. It is another fabric of being not dependent on scapegoating and victims.

That is why the early Christians were able to offer forgiveness and nonviolence without a second thought–because they had entered a totally new experience of being human.

It is essential to grasp this. We cannot stop being human beings by mere moral command. We cannot stop collectively scapegoating if our very humanity depends on it, which it does! The only way to stop is if there is a new collective basis of humanity revealed; if the revelation is sufficiently dramatic and shared to make a new community possible. This is resurrection. It is the in-breaking into history of indestructible forgiveness and nonviolence.

Now, with a political triumph of exclusion and othering, resurrection as the basis for new humanity has never been more crucial. The negative half of gospel anthropology–the disclosure of the victim–has taken the world by storm, and everyone now instinctively sides with the victim and claims to be the victim. It is time for the positive half–the resurrection humanity of love and forgiveness–to become equally well known. The whole world can learn this new thing (and in many ways is learning it). But it is surely down to those who claim to be church–Christian community–to show themselves as compelling examples.

“For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only son, that everyone who believes in him shall not be wiped out but have unbounded life. For God did not send his son into the world to condemn it, but to save the world through him.”                                                                                                                                                                                                                                       resurrection